Monday, April 8, 2024

Shakespeare Puts Joey to Sleep in Friends

“The One with the Donor.” By 
Andrew Reich and Ted Cohen. Perf. David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc. Dir. Ben WeissFriends. Season 9, episode 22. NBC. 8 May 2003. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2003.

We at Bardfilm don't obsess about completeness. We don't feel the need to track down every Shakespeare allusion in, say, M*A*S*H or The Simpsons or Star Trek.

Well, we do feel that way about Star Trek, but perhaps Friends is a better example. It's a well-known show, and when a bit of Shakespeare comes to our attention, as sometimes happens when ShakespeareGeek happens to catch something randomly and decides to pass it on.

That's how we got to this late-in-the-run general reference to Shakespeare:


What play could Joey have been trying out for? If he's saying, "I mean, hey, Shakespeare, how about a chase scene once in a while?" it can't have been one of the exciting ones. Perhaps he was reading for the role of James Gurney in King John or something like that.

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest